LinkedIn Tips: 10 Ways To Do More

LinkedIn has changed extensively in its first decade. Check out our 10 tips on recently revised features and how to use them wisely.

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When LinkedIn launched 10 years ago, the network was seen as a novel -- but certainly not "must-use" -- online career and contact tool. Indeed, social networking wasn't really a "thing" back then.

Today, presence on LinkedIn is quite simply a best practice for any professional looking to progress in his or her career -- whether that means actively seeking a new position, researching and connecting with potential new clients or seeking advice and expertise from members who have a stated expertise in a new technology you are researching. The site has gone from a place to post your resume electronically, search for jobs and connect with colleagues, to a rich social collaboration platform. And while LinkedIn has certainly made improvements during the decade, the last couple of years have seen a flurry of particularly important enhancements.

LinkedIn was rolled out in 2003, started by a group that included colleagues formerly with SocialNet and PayPal. Growth was slow at first, with as few as 20 signups on some days. Fast-forward to this May, and LinkedIn has more than 225 million members, with two members being added every second, according to the company.

At the time of its Q1 2013 earnings announcement, LinkedIn released an update to some of its stats:

-- Unique visitors (including members and non-members) increased 29% year over year to average 132 million in the first quarter of 2013, according to ComScore. When including SlideShare, LinkedIn averaged 170 million monthly unique visitors.

-- Professionals outside the United States make up more than 64% of LinkedIn.

-- In the first quarter of 2013, an average of 30% of unique visiting members to LinkedIn came through mobile apps, versus just 19% a year ago.

-- Page views (excluding mobile) increased 18% from a year ago to 11 billion in the first quarter of 2013, according to ComScore.

-- LinkedIn is the 22nd most-visited website in the world as of March 2013, according to ComScore.

-- More than 2.9 million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages.

-- More than 1.5 million unique publishers actively use the LinkedIn inShare button on their sites.

-- There are more than 2.1 million LinkedIn Groups.

-- More than 5.7 billion professionally oriented searches were done on LinkedIn in 2012.

-- There are more than 30 million students and recent college graduates on LinkedIn today. They are LinkedIn's fastest-growing demographic.

When you compare an original LinkedIn home page (shown above left) to one today, it's clear how far the platform has come. In the slides that follow, we look at 10 ways in which LinkedIn has changed and recommend how you can take full advantage of its features.

I liked using Linked for maintaining professional connections. I HATE the obnoxious spam machine it is turning into. There is a reason I RUN away from facebook. The "endorsements" thing ranks very high on the list of Linked annoyances.

DebraI love your writing. I understand the format in which it is written since InformationWeek is most likely striving to improve its page ranking. May I please give you my perspective regarding this twelve windows split article? Please bear with me but it is plainly annoying. I cannot read it on readability, I cannot read in on clearly, I cannot paste it into my Evernote account. I cannot print it for future reference. This formatting is chasing me away from your article, this website and altogether from promoting your work to my Twitter Followers (which i have done many times in the past without a single acknowledgement from your part). Debra do you please have any suggestions on how to motivate me to remain one of your motivated and enthusiastic reader? Respectful Regards from this side of the pond. Bruno Gebarski @BrunoGebarski (on Twitter)

Ditto. I hate the way these slide shows work: I hate having to click "more" to expand a 2-line window to show all 3 lines of text, on every slide. I don't mind needing to click 'More' on the first one, but once I start going from slide to slide, it should automatically show the entire text on each one, because I've already declared that I want to read it. But most of the time, there's so little content on each slide that there's no reason for multiple slides; two or three pages would be plenty to cover every topic in the 12-slide show.

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